e sat there an instant
on his horse, she threw kisses at him and he threw them back. And when
the men rode away, she stood in the road, and he could see her in the
light of the waning fire, and thirty years passed and still he saw
her.

As the headlight of the train lit up the cinder yard, and brought the
glint of the rails out of the darkness, John Barclay, a thousand miles
away and thirty years after, fancied he could see her there in the
railroad yards beside him waving her hands at him, smiling at him with
the new-found joy in her face. For there is no difference between
fifty-three and twenty-three when men are in love, and if they are in
love with the same woman in both years, her face will never change,
her smile will always seem the same. And to John Barclay there on the
rear platform of the car, with the crash of the great train in his
ears, the same face looked out of the night at him that he saw back in
his twenties, and he knew that the same prayer to the same God would
go up that night for him that went up from the same lips so long ago.
The man on the car platform rose from his chair, and went into the
car.

"Well," he said to Lycurgus Mason as the old man reached for his
watch, "how about it?"

Lycurgus replied as he put it back in his pocket, "Just seven minutes
and a half. She's covered a lot of track in those seven minutes!"

And John Barclay looked back over the years, and saw a boy riding like
the wind through the night, changing horses every half-hour, and
trying to tell time from his watch by a rising moon, but the moon was
blown with clouds like a woman's hair, and he could not see the hands
on the watch face. So as he looked at the old man sitting crooked over
in the great leather chair, John Barclay only grunted, "Yes--she's
covered a long stretch of country in those seven minutes." And he
picked the Biography off the table and read to himself: "I sometimes
think that only that part of the soul that loves is saved. The rest is
dross and perishes in the fire. Whether the love be the love of woman
or the love of kind, or the love of God that embraces all, it matters
not. That sanctifies; that purifies--that marks the way of the only
salvation the soul can know, and he who does not love with the fervour
of a passionate heart some of God's creatures, cannot love God, and
not loving Him, is lost in spite of all his prayers, in spite of all
his aspirations. Therefore, if you would live you must l